Big Oil’s Big Data Push Changing the Future of Energy

Editor

Aboard the Noble Bully 1, Gulf of Mexico—The Noble Bully 1, a new kind of drill ship developed by Royal Dutch Shell PLC to help extract oil in once inaccessible regions of the deepest oceans, doesn’t look anything like a conventional vessel of its kind. Equipped with a new generation of digital technologies, the ship—a 30,270 gross ton behemoth that is the length of two football fields—is able to guide a 21.5 inch wide drill bit thousands of feet below the surface to the center of a target that is only about four by four feet in size.

The new design helps Shell drill wells faster, more safely and at lower cost than ever before—part of a revolution in industrial technology that has been an important factor in the increased energy production—and independence—of the U.S. and North America.

Steve Rosenbush for The Wall Street Journal

The Noble Bully 1 helps Royal Dutch Shell PLC extract oil in once inaccessible regions of the deepest oceans.

Innovations in IT, including powerful new data imaging and predictive analytics, are making it possible for companies such as Shell BP PLC and Chevron Corp. to map and exploit previously uncharted oil and gas fields locked in shale and “tight” rock formations, or buried far below the ocean floor and obscured by thick layers of salt.

“Since I started out, the water has gotten deeper, the wells have gotten deeper and the technology has gotten much more challenging,” says David Loeb, Shell’s deepwater operations manager in the Gulf of Mexico, who joined the company in 1975.

Seven to eight feet narrower, and 160 to 260 feet shorter than conventional such vessels, the Noble Bully 1 can operate in depths of 150 feet to 8,250 of water—and as deep as 12,000 feet with some safety upgrades. It can drill as much as 40,000 feet below the floor of the sea.

The Bully’s great distinguishing feature, however is its fully enclosed white tower—which replaces the typical open-derrick style towers that have characterized oil rigs for generations and look something like smaller versions of the Eiffel Tower. The enclosed tower encompasses two hoists—one for active drilling, and the other to assemble the 40-foot pipes that are linked together to create drill pipes that extend from the ship into the earth, miles below.

Although smaller, Shell says the Bully has as much thrusting power and storage capacity as conventional ships.

Technology on the Bully, which includes built-in GPS, wind sensors, motion sensors and compasses, a hydraulic system, and computer-controlled thruster propellers on the bottom of the vessel, allows Shell to drill wells with new precision.

Mr. Loeb helped conceive and now manages the Noble Bully drill ship that was developed by Shell and Frontier Drilling, now owned by Noble Corp. It is drilling wells for Shell in the Mississippi Canyons section of the Gulf about 120 miles south of New Orleans. It’s an important place in the history of deepwater drilling—Shell made the first deepwater discovery, called Cognac, there in 1975. And in 2010, the canyons were the site of the historic Deepwater Horizon spill. The Horizon, drilling about 40 miles south of the Louisiana shore, at the Macondo field, sank and caused catastrophic damage. A second ship using the same design, the Noble Bully 2, operates off the coast of Brazil.

The Noble Bully 1 is drilling wells for a new platform, to be called Olympus, which will provide the infrastructure for two deepwater developments, West Boreas and South Deimos. The Olympus will be a tension leg platform—meaning that it will float in the sea like a cork, tethered to the ocean floor with cables.

The project, known as the Mars B development, has made use of new technology from start to finish. The area was explored in 2007 by an exploration vessel using a new kind of seismic technology called Ocean Bottom Sensing, which replaced older, fixed cables outfitted with underwater listening devices with lighter, movable lines closer to the floor of the Gulf. The technology is now used by other companies as well, according to Shell. The new sensors can pick up more data—echoes of sonic blasts sent out by an exploration ship—than older generations. The data are then analyzed using artificial intelligence developed by Shell, and rendered in 3D and 4D maps of the oil reservoirs, using computer chips similar to those found in advanced video games. The analysis of the data is handled by Shell scientists working onshore, and the finished visualizations are available to the crew of the drill ship.

The ship has unmanned submarines equipped with robotic arms and high-definition video cameras; they can be shot off the ship and guided to the drilling operation on the ocean floor, if needed.

The highly automated drill ship uses 160 workers–40% fewer drill contractor workers than required on other drill ships—which lowers operating costs and improves safety by removing people from around the ship’s drilling area. The smaller ship also contains less steel and uses less fuel than more conventional designs and operates with a goal of zero toxic emissions. Shell says it has never had a major spill in 30-plus years of deepwater drilling, but safety is an almost constant topic of conversation aboard the Bully, where anyone—even visitors—have the authority to stop work if they think something isn’t right, a ship’s officer said during an orientation session aboard the vessel.

In an increasingly automated work environment, chief drillers on the Noble Bully sit in “drill chairs” and manipulate the speed and direction of the drill pipes using joy sticks and computer screens. “Today, it is a whole lot safer,” said Timothy Craft, a 12-year Noble veteran who has worked his way up from roustabout to roughneck to assistant driller and is now training for a job as a chief driller. “You don’t have to worry about employees being in harm’s way, you don’t have to put your hands on as much. It is really great,” he said during an interview onboard the Bully.

But the company is just scratching the surface of automation, according to Jonathan Crane, vice president of wells technology deployment at Shell. He says that the judgment of veteran drillers—such as Loeb—is as much art as science. “Some of these guys are legendary, because of their intuition about how to move the drill,” he says. His group is in the midst of interviewing some of those legendary drillers, so that their experience and judgment can be captured in algorithms that automate the drilling process. Early experiments show that some of these algorithms are capable of matching or exceeding the performance of the average human driller, he said.

Shell says the Bully can create the top section of a well in seven to nine days, instead of 20, the time required by conventional ultra-deepwater drill ships.

The exploration and drilling technology at work in Mars has extended the projected life of the field. Shell has already recovered more than 700 million barrels of oil, surpassing its original projection in 1989 that it would recover 680 million barrels. It expects to recover an additional 1 billion from the field.

While Shell has been a leader in offshore technology—it made the first deepwater oil discovery in 1975 and today, it is the only company engaged in offshore drilling in the Arctic—it is hardly alone.

Chevron is investing heavily in imaging technologies that allow it to create maps of energy deposits tens of thousands of feet below the surface of the ocean floor. “In this business…whoever images the best wins, because if you see it first, you’re going to get the lease, and if you see it better, you’re going to do a better job of managing the field,” says Mark Koelmel, general manager of the earth sciences department at Chevron.

BP announced in December that it is building the world’s largest commercial research supercomputer at its facilities in Houston. Technology has also dramatically extended the life of the largest oil field in North America, Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope of Alaska. BP originally expected to recover about 10 billion barrels of oil, or 40% of the field’s capacity, Bruce Williams, BP’s Alaska operations manager said. Now the company expects to recover 60%, or 15 billion barrels. “I view technology as a way to extend the life of the facility in the safest manner possible,” he said. BP operates Prudhoe Bay on behalf of its other working-interest owners ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil Corp. Conoco and ExxonMobile declined to comment.

Not so long ago, the end of the fossil fuel era seemed to be in sight. But now, says Roger Anderson, a computer imaging pioneer at the Center for Computational Learning Systems and adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, technology is enabling a more gradual shift to renewable resources over the next 30 or 40 years. The position of Western energy companies during the next few decades may be stronger than expected just a few years ago, too.

Comments (3 of 3)

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on how Big Data is helping oil companies like shell.

How much would you attribute these advances in deep sea drilling to (Esp for a company like Shell) to 'drilling technology' becoming efficient and lithe itself vs say Big Data and Analytics? Is the predictive analytics / imaging contributing to say 25% of these benefits gained by Shell (40% less manpower, 7-8 days intead of 20 days to create initial well structure etc.)?

Also, could you share some of the Big Data tools and technologies that are usually deployed by Oil Companies besides say Hadoop?

Shaloo

3:43 pm January 11, 2013

John wrote:

No deep water drilling spills in 30 years? Shame Royal Dutch Shell can't claim the same for the spills they inflicted since the seventies on the Niger Delta and killing many Ogoni people and many who are still drinking carcinogenic water! Do the right thing shell! Apply the same standards to Africa as you would to the US and compensate the Ogoni People so they can clean up !

10:29 pm January 9, 2013

Ron Wagner wrote:

Great story. I didn't know much about this technology at sea.

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